About Carla Busuttil

Claiming, “within my work, it is the quality of painting that matters. Content is secondary—always secondary,” Carla Busuttil fills her canvases with dark and vivid images of monstrous humanoid figures, shaped primarily by the process of painting itself. She revels in the physical qualities of her medium, as evidenced by her bold, expressive brushstrokes, nuanced color combinations, and deft handling of oil paint. Her figures—ghastly grinning ladies; bug-eyed generals; children with smeared, undefined features—are formed from an amalgam of hues and of photographic images that Busuttil finds in libraries, newspapers, and magazines. She gravitates towards pictures of conflict. Her hybrid beings retain recognizable traces of these source images and the violence and chaos they capture. They are, in part, fusions of people and wars across time and cultures, “a line through diverse histories,” as Busuttil describes.

South African, b. 1982, Johannesburg, South Africa, based in Berlin, Germany